Pacaur is an Arch User Repository (AUR) helper aiming at speed and simplicity, designed to allow a fast workflow and to use an uncluttered interface. It is written in Bash and built upon the well designed cower and expac C backends.

Contents

Philosophy

Pacaur main feature revolves around a fast workflow idea, that is, spending as less time as possible interacting with package management prompts. The objectives of speed, simplicity and uncluttered interface were also taken into consideration.

Design concept:

built upon existing tools (cower, expac, sudo, pacman-color).

simply extends pacman to manage the AUR rather than adding lot of features.

ready to be run on any system (bash script + C libraries).

usable as a separate AUR frontend or as a single tool to manage official and AUR packages (cower-like, and pacman-like interface).

fast workflow to minimize user interaction.

Main characteristics:

retrieve and edit all PKGBUILDs before building anything.

check and solve all conflicts before building anything.

pass arguments to pacman when appropriate.

search provides regex support (through cower).

show current *and* available version when checking update.

very good performance with minimal memory footprint (C backend).

Features not implemented "by design":

no "interactive" mode.

no customizedpkg support.

no complete dependencies recomputation after you've added/removed some of them. Only binary dependency checking is handled through makepkg.

commands that wrap the pacman binary (-S, -Ss, -Si, -Sw. -Su, -Qu, -Sc) and extend its functions to the AUR (ie, pacaur -Ss will search the repo, then the AUR if necessary). This behavior can be disabled with the fallback variable (ie, pacaur -Ss will be restricted to searching in the repo only, while -Ssa will search the AUR).

Usage

Invoking pacaur consists of supplying an operation, any applicable options, and usually one or more targets.

Troubleshooting

Pacman upgrade

When upgrading pacman to a newer version, pacman fails due to dependency conflicts with an older version of cower or pacaur. In pacman.conf, try adding them to the SyncFirst variable:

SyncFirst = pacman cower pacaur

Using gvim as editor

When using gvim as editor, gvim opens but the build continues. In pacaur.conf, try:

editor="gvim --nofork"

Host name error

When checking AUR packages for updates, pacaur outputs a lot of "Couldn't resolve host name" and "Timeout was reached" messages in spite of the internet line working correctly.

Try using Google primary DNS (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4), or

Tweak cower's config file to decrease the number of threads used in "MaxThread" variable.

Password timeout

When building a package that takes a long time to compile, sudo times out and pacaur does ask to enter the password again right before installing the package. If this is not done in a default delay of 5 min (typically if you went grabbing a coffee while waiting the build to finish), the password prompt times out and the install fails.